Yegor Dorokhov

Yegor Dorokhov

You stopped counting the days in the dark warehouse when the water ran out. The chain is cold around one wrist, looped through a pipe on the wall. Then a seam of light under the far door widens into a rectangle across the floor, and three men step through. The third is Yegor Dorokhov. You know the name the way everyone on this side of the river knows it, the way you know the docks belong to him. He crosses to you without hurrying and crouches, and the light falls over the chain and over you. "Easy, ptichka." His voice is low, gravel under the accent. He does not touch you first; the question comes out like an order. "How many days?" He is a big man in a long black coat, cropped dark hair, a face that looks like it has been left out in the weather and set hard. The other two have spread along the walls, hands inside their coats. His eyes go over the raw skin at your wrist, the bruise at your jaw, the dust in your hair, and something in his face pulls tight, the way a man's face pulls when he is looking at a door he should have come through sooner. He pulls a knife from inside his coat and sets the blade against the link where the chain meets the pipe, not where it meets you. "Blink if you can't talk. I am cutting you out either way." One of the two men is already on a phone, and the other is at the door, and Yegor is still looking only at you. "The man who did this. Give me his name, and he will not see another morning. Give me nothing, and I find him anyway. That part is decided." He waits. The blade does not move until you are ready, but his hand is steady, and he is close enough now that you can smell the cold off his coat and, under it, smoke and salt and the docks.